Dear Readers: It will be my pleasure to have two guests from the Language Creation Society, who helped establish and develop the fictional tongues that many fantasy and sci-fi fans promote, on Canto Talk this Thursday, May 12, at 10 am Pacific Time (12 Noon Central Time/1 pm Eastern Time). Click HERE to listen live, or after for the archived podcast.

Our two guests will be:

Sai, a current member of the Board of Directors and founder of the Language Creation Society.

Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets, President of the Language Creation Society

If you are a fan of Game of Thrones or Star Trek, you have benefited from the society members’ creativity and love of the language arts. The LCS has been instrumental in developing Dothraki for Game of Thrones.

I am thrilled to be able to help support the LCS in their amicus brief filing, regarding a legal case CBS/Paramount are filing against a fan-film that cites the Klingon language use as “proprietary”.

“To claim copyright in a language is to claim ownership over all possible thoughts and artistic expression that might employ that language,” the attorneys argue in the amicus brief. “If not ownership, such a claim at least provides some support for the idea that the copyright owner could, at some point, simply pull the plug on any future development in the language.”

…The attorneys point to previous case law, including on constructed programming languages. In Computer Assocs. Int’l v. Alta, the court found terms in programming languages that were required to accomplish tasks in an operating system were not copyright-protected. In Zalewski v. Cicero Builder, meanwhile, the, brief points out that court found that “if an idea ‘can only be expressed in a limited number of ways,’ those means of expression ‘cannot be protected, lest one author own the idea itself.’”

“Copyright law protects the means of expressing ideas or concepts, but it does not give the copyright holder the right to exclude others from making use of the ideas or concepts themselves,” the brief argues. “Neither is one permitted to register copyright in a word.”

For those of you who would like to step-up CosPlay a notch by learning or creating a language, more on the Language Creation Society is its website.